Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien Page A

about running away.” She had her eyes closed as if she were imagining it right then, some new place farther inland, a new
     city identical to this one, but different in all the right ways.
    Sometime after midnight, she stood up and walked slowly down the back steps. When she returned, she was carrying the cage
     of hutch rabbits. We lay on the deck watching them, then Paula undid the latch. Reaching in, she lifted the rabbits out one
     by one until all five sat shivering on the deck. “Go,” she said, waving towards the stairs. “This might be your last chance.”
     They stayed where they were, frozen by the traffic sounds and the half moon. Paula leaned down and blew on each of them gently.
     They crept forward. “Go on.” They froze.
    She gathered the nearest one in her arms. Then she stood and walked across the veranda, the rabbit bundled against her chest.
     At the railing she stopped, stretched her arms out, and held it straight in front of her. There was laundry on the line, shirts
     pinned up like paper cut-outs. A light came on in her parents’ bedroom. Paula opened her arms. I saw the rabbit falling slowly.
    The traffic on Knight Street kept going by and going by. She ran down the back stairs. I heard her say, “Oh no,” in a flat
     voice. I didn’t look. I gathered the other four and put them back in the hutch. Paulalaid a piece of newspaper on the concrete walkway, overtop of the one she had dropped. She looked up at me and said, “My fingers
     slipped.”
    I said, “It’s okay. There are lots of others.”
    That night, in the middle of sleep, I heard voices, a man and a woman. They were whispering, and he was impatient with her.
     I thought I felt Paula get up and leave me but when I woke up in the night I was confused because it was only the two of us
     in her bedroom. Paula had one arm across my waist; she had her face buried against my arm.
    Jonah came over to my house twice a week and I helped him with his science homework. We memorized the periods of the geologic
     time scale, traded them back and forth as if they were codes. “Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Tertiary, Quaternary,” he giggled.
     I laughed with him.
    We sat with our legs dangling out the window, and I said again, “I love you.” He looked at me, his face confused. “How do
     you know?” he asked.
    “I just do.”
    He said, “You’re crazy.”
    When he lay on top of me I looked up at him and willed myself to feel joyous, exuberant, but it was like something on the
     other side of the world. He caught my eye for a moment and I saw an expressionpass across his face. Afterwards, I tried to name what I saw. Pity, perhaps, more pity than love.
    When Jonah left, I walked to Paula’s house. At Knight Street, I stood on the curb. My mom said this was the most dangerous
     street in the city, all the semis, four-by-fours, speed demons. I thought of walking into the street. But I wasn’t brave enough
     to do a thing like that. Standing on the sidewalk, the traffic whipping my hair from my face, I felt the sensation of flight.
    Paula’s house was just around the corner. I walked across her front lawn, then rapped on the window. When she opened the door
     and saw me, she didn’t look at all surprised. She poured two glasses of brandy and we watched
Mask,
a movie with Cher and a boy who had the elephant-man disease. The sun went down through the window behind the television
     set; it filled the glass and steeped the room in sunlight. In the movie, Cher fights for her son because she loves him so
     deeply it cuts her open. Paula filled our glasses again and again. The bottle shone like a coin in the room.
    Paula turned to face me. She said, “I’ve got the other bedroom all set up.”
    I could feel the brandy slipping down my throat, holding in my chest, and pumping warmth like a spare heart. “I told you,
     Paula. I have my own home.”
    She looked taken aback, then she nodded. “We’re best friends. Even best friends don’t